Citation

This profile was prepared when Paulina Campos Villaseñor was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2016.

The New Idea

Seeing the destructive effects of the housing development, stripped of any type of social cohesion, Paulina has launched a new approach that empowers residents in housing units, by creating self-sustaining community organizations, revitalizing public spaces, and developing projects that promote social cohesion. Paulina´s approach is based on residents´ real needs, which she surveys, maps, and analyzes before all community interventions. She intervenes to establish resource centers and reclaim neighborhood public spaces and catalyze self-sustaining neighborhood organizations directed at solving the specific location-specific issues. From the very beginning, participating members are given the duty of identifying and prioritizing community problems, and then designing and managing all aspects of their projects to allow the programs to be sustainable long-term.

Approaching the issue from the structural side, Paulina is influencing credit lenders, construction companies and developers by showing the monetary and public relations benefits of investing in the construction of vibrant communities which both raises the value of the units and lowers abandonment rates. Not only empowering residents, but also forming a private and public sector framework is an essential part of Paulina’s long term vision of all relevant actors having communities´ needs and wellbeing as their core motivation.

Paulina has created a unique intervention program focused on changing the ingrained patterns of disconnection and apathy by reimagining housing centers to be incubators of resilient, connected and vibrant communities.

The Problem

In the last decade, the construction of low income housing projects has grown immensely in Mexico. With the goal of averting a housing crisis, millions of mortgage credits were granted, adding up to more than 28 million Mexican low cost house owners. This growth rate is expected to continue in the next four decades; it is calculated that during this time 50% of the actual housing stock will be constructed.

This initiative has been successful in tackling the country's housing deficit, but in order to be able to comply with the demand, housing units had to be built in a fast and cost effective way, which did not consider the community in the strategy. Infrastructure challenges - lack of public spaces, adequate mobility services and even basic services such as lighting, sewage and waste disposals – are mostly created by a lack of commitment from developers, who are not obliged to maintain the projects once they are done with the construction. Social issues – apathy, lack of positive leadership, violence, delinquency, addictions, plagues, and low social cohesion are caused by a large concentration of a diverse group of low socioeconomic level homeowners with no support network. These issues lead to high levels of house abandonment; an average of 30% and up to 70% of houses in units are abandoned, leading to debt without assets. Without common, usable spaces, neighbors live anonymously, and the problems of violence, delinquency, and disconnection created from lack of accountability persist.

Although in the last several years, the opportunity to own a house has increased, this has not translated into social and economic prosperity. Social interest housing projects have not been successful in becoming communities with strong social ties, where inhabitants can develop healthily and where their investment becomes an asset for the future. The public efforts to solve these issues have all been top down initiatives, leaving homeowners as disempowered beneficiaries with no real change in levels of community cohesion or resilience.

The Strategy

Seeing the grave problems within the housing sector from her position in INFONAVIT, a government institution which provides more than 70% of the mortgage credits in Mexico, Paulina realized that externally imposed and perpetuated initiatives rarely solve community problems. Understanding that a lasting solution must start from a bottom-up approach, Paulina brainstormed ways to introduce endogenous dynamics that would truly empower the residents. In 2013, Paulina transitioned into her leadership role at the nonprofit, Fundación Hogares and began by hiring social promoters, training them in needs analysis and created a framework to organize community groups that would be autonomous and self-perpetuating long-term.

From the beginning, Paulina knew that every initiative must begin with needs analysis. She developed a solid methodology where every neighbor (even within housing units with up to 35,000 residents) is invited to fill out an initial survey where they assess their needs and challenges and reflect what needs to be prioritized. Once the assessment has been completed, neighbors meet and brainstorm solutions, and organize into committees to start working on the selected issues. The solutions must come from within, but with the support of Fundación Hogares in organization, legal registration of neighborhood associations, and various trainings and education.

Paulina recognized that one of the barriers to neighbors effectively working together to tackle these community problems was a lack of usable, accessible, public spaces. Working together to restore physical-urban spaces that can be used by the entire community can promote healthy coexistence and also provides fast and visible results of the community working together, which is a stepping stone to be able to confront more complex problems. Beautification, restoration, and community art projects complement this space revitalization. Paulina´s model uses these interventions before, during and after community organization programs.

Paulina has a deep belief that programs which are not measured cannot be improved, so she has designed a complex evaluation framework with indicators that focus on civic participation, local efforts, social return on investment, neighbor cohesion, perception of safety and belonging, and increase of the value of the house. Measuring this impact not only serves as a way to improve the organization´s model continuously, but these results are also leveraged towards showing actors in the housing sector, especially credit institutions and developers, that the model is a smart investment for them, as it increases the value of the units and prevents people from abandoning the house, and failing to pay their loan. The model can be deployed in all housing units, in newly constructed ones with a preventive focus, and in older and deteriorated ones, with a reactive one.

The vision is to transform the way the sector works in the country, and to have the developers adopt this methodology as part of their business strategy. For this, she knows she has to change the way developers understand their business, and fully realize the added value of having residents who are empowered, organized, and developing projects autonomously. In the short term she is working on refining the impact measurement system, so that she can factually demonstrate the social and economic benefits that come with developing units that are home to active and responsible communities. Also, she wants to be able to aggregate all the information that they have gathered and use it to compare and rank which developers´ units have better community conditions. The goal is for this index to become a reference for buyers, government and credit institutions. Paulina´s 10 year vision is to have 50% of the country's developers adopting the model, as she believes with the increased number of actors on board, the rest will have to adopt the model to become competitive. As more developers begin to adopt this requirement, Paulina will push for a legal regulation for the sector that mandates that any housing unit development must have a community development factor.

In the two years that Paulina has led Fundación Hogares, they have worked in 158 housing units, impacting 531,716 people, of which 85% want to continue to be involved in projects that improve their communities after their first engagement. These neighbors have put more than 500,000 hours of work into their communities which are valued at more than 14 million MXN (900,000 USD). Paulina´s model has increased the value of the houses by 20% and she is currently working with 10% of the development companies of the country, including the largest one (by number of houses built by year). She has demonstrated through evaluating the social return on investment that for every 1 MXN invested by her donors, the return in social value is of 17.15 MXN. Through the communications strategy, Fundación Hogares is getting the word out on many levels, contacting journalists, having television and radio presence, and encouraging other groups to use her evaluation indexes.

The nonprofit has a yearly budget of around 113 million MXN (approximately 6,600,000 USD) and a team of 48 people, most of whom are on the ground. The main sources of income for Fundación Hogares are grants from foundations and partnerships with the public and private sector, such as INFONAVIT, Compartamos Bank, Banorte Foundation, Roma Group (one of the largest developers in the country) and ADO Foundation. In an effort to increase the nonprofit’s financial sustainability, she negotiated with INFONAVIT to receive 4% of the sale of abandoned houses, as she has proved and continues to prove that her methodologies reduce house abandonment. In the near future, Paulina envisions Fundación Hogares´ budget being largely covered by a premium on mortgage payments that clients cover to have community development models in their units, and that are matched by developers.

The Person

Paulina saw, growing up, how the combination of a lack of access to mortgage credits, as well as high interest and inflation rates were huge barrier to the wellbeing of her family and others. She became interested in the financial systems that allowed for this insecurity, and with this in mind, she decided to study Economics; a discipline she thought had the rigor of a science but could be focused towards social impact. Knowing that she needed to have a more policy-based education to be able to understand the landscape of the housing sector issues faced, she decided to study an MPP at Harvard University. It was during her time in Harvard that she became increasingly more interested in the housing sector, and wrote her first case study on the relationship between quality of life and obtaining a mortgage in Mexico. Upon completing her studies, Paulina returned to Mexico and started working at INFONAVIT, a government institution that provides 70% of mortgage credits in the country, as she knew it was here where she could best learn about the sector.

Within INFONAVIT, Paulina was able to be hone her intrapreneurial skills: she led the creation of the sustainability area of the institutions, which was in charge of overseeing the social development of creditors. She successfully added unit neighborhood participation as one of the factors in INFONAVIT’s points system for choosing development projects, and this new criteria began encouraging developers to invest in community development in their unit. Additionally, her INFONAVIT initiatives led the creation of a social impact measurement program that could reveal if and how the lives of creditors improved after they became homeowners. With these studies, she discovered, sadly, that the answer was no- lives were not improving. She was able to travel the country and saw first-hand the problems faced by homeowners nationwide, and from these experiences, she left INFONAVIT and began leading the initiative called Fundación Hogares in 2013, a platform in which she saw the potential to create the change she envisioned.